Frankie Flack: Why I hate sites such as Seeking Alpha
A lot of business reporters are assholes. I’m not sure there are more assholes per capita in business journalism, but, by virtue of the job, they can be pretty high profile. It’s clear that a lot of those folks get their jollies from seeing share prices swing up or down (mostly down). But I respect […]
Frankie Flack: Winning after the verdict
Last week the Columbia Journalism Review published a brief story about how various industry publications wrote notably different news pieces based on one press release. The stories centered around a lawsuit between the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Hotfile, which is described in the piece as “a cyberlocker service that lets users upload […]
Frankie Flack: Protecting milliseconds in the lockup room
CNBC has a lengthy and fascinating report online Tuesday about that some traders in Chicago somehow received word about the Federal Reserve Board’s announcement last week that it would not be scaling back its support of the economy. The investigation centers around a matter of milliseconds where traders were able to move large amounts of […]
Frankie Flack: The little engine of building reputation
Last week, I happened to be listening to “Mike & Mike,” a morning ESPN Radio show where the hosts discuss the major sports news of the day. That day they were discussing news how Ryan Braun, a player for the Milwaukee Brewers who has been accused of steroid use and suspended from baseball, was personally […]
Frankie Flack: The trouble with broadcast business news
I’m a big fan of business news in all forms, print, online, radio and television. However, I have to admit that, for me, business news is just better in print. This is really fundamentally driven by the different business models of print and broadcast news that forces them to go after consumers in different ways. […]
Frankie Flack: Help biz reporters understand what they’re writing
Writing business news is unquestionably an increasingly difficult task. Each year its seems that the financial markets become more sophisticated and faster moving as companies become larger and more complex. It is not an enviable task then to be the lonely reporter, who likely got into journalism due to some aversion to numbers, finance or […]
Frankie Flack: Reporters don’t have a team in a business fight
A good friend of mine once told me that when it comes to business competition most senior executives would offer their first born child to gain one point of market share from a competitor. While this is certainly an overstatement of biblical proportions, it is instructive to remember that while public relations tend to focus […]
Frankie Flack: Correcting facts ahead of time
I have spent a lot of time in this column discussing the importance of building relationships with reporters. You hear it so often in the public relations world that many people have stopped thinking about what these words mean and why “relationships” are a cornerstone of the practice of public relations. In fact, many reporters […]
Frankie Flack: Beaten by the drum beat
During the last couple of weeks the number of headlines using the words crisis, scandal and shocker have increased tenfold. Political editors have had to dive deeply into their thesaurus’ to keep the text of one scandal story after another fresh for readers. While I am no expert on governmental affairs or political public relations, […]
Frankie Flack: The comedy of PR and media conversations
In the great comedy sketch “Who’s on First” two comedians, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, go back and forth in a wonderfully written piece where the two performers struggle to understand the names of the players on a St. Louis baseball team. Hearing the patient Costello inform a confused and irritated Costello the names of […]
